Ordinal Linguistic Personification - Experimental Studies

Experimental Studies

Personifications tend to co-occur with grapheme-color synesthesia and share many of the characteristics that are definitional of synesthesia, such as being consistent over considerable time intervals and generating concurrents automatically (Simner & Holenstein 2007). To demonstrate that personifications are automatically evoked, Simner and Holenstein used a modified Stroop paradigm, in which a mismatch between the evoked personality and the gender leads to slower reaction times. To test this, synesthete AP was asked to report whether common names, like Brian or Betsy were male or female names. Because ‘b’ is a male letter for AP, she was faster to identify Brian as being a male name, and slower to identify Betsy as being a female name. These results demonstrate that personifications are automatically evoked, as are other forms of synesthesia. In a slightly different task, in which letters that evoke either male or female personifications are arranged into a stick figure of either a boy or a girl, reactions times are slower when the letters do not match the figure than when they do, again demonstrating the automaticity of this form of synesthesia (Sagiv et al. 2005).